The Bad Seed (Mervyn LeRoy, 1956)

Nancy Kelly and Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed

Cast: Nancy Kelly, Patty McCormack, Evelyn Varden, Eileen Heckart, William Hopper, Henry Jones, Paul Fix, Joan Croydon, Gage Clarke, Jesse White, Frank Cady. Screenplay: John Lee Mahin, based on a play by Maxwell Anderson and a novel by William March. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: John Beckman. Film editing: Warren Low. Music: Alex North. 

The Bad Seed stands out today as one of the more muddle-headed products of Production Code censorship. In the play and novel on which the movie was based, Christine Penmark, the unwitting carrier of the gene that turns her daughter, Rhoda, into a serial killer, commits suicide after giving the child an overdose of sleeping pills. One of the shocks of the novel and play is that Rhoda survives to kill again. But suicide as a positive plot resolution and crimes that go unpunished were taboo under the Code, so John Lee Mahin's adaptation blunts the ending for both characters. And then, to add farce to bathos, someone thought it a good idea to add a "curtain call" sequence in which the actress playing Christine, Nancy Kelly, gives the actress playing Rhoda, Patty McCormack, a spanking. Since spanking is hardly a punishment for murder, you have to wonder if Kelly is punishing McCormack for upstaging her. (In any case, McCormack seems to be enjoying it a little too much.) Still, if you take the movie on its own terms, it has its creepy moments, most of them involving McCormack, whom we spot as a bad kid from the moment she shows up with her braids so tight it looks like they hurt and wearing a starchy, spotless outfit that no decent child would have tolerated for a moment. There's some entertaining overplaying by Evelyn Varden as the psychologizing landlady and Henry Jones as the nosy hired man. The production is stagy and the performances often overblown, with the exception of Kelly, who strives to make her character -- and the ridiculous premise that evil is inherited -- credible. It's a role that could easily have tipped over into camp -- as the rest of the film often does -- but Kelly balances right on the edge. 

Come Back, Little Sheba (Daniel Mann, 1952)

Shirley Booth and Burt Lancaster in Come Back, Little Sheba

Cast: Shirley Booth, Burt Lancaster, Terry Moore, Richard Jaeckel, Philip Ober, Edwin Max, Lisa Golm, Walter Kelley. Screenplay: Ketti Frings, based on a play by William Inge. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Henry Bumstead, Hal Pereira. Film editing: Warren Low. Music: Franz Waxman.

Shirley Booth won an Oscar for her portrayal of Lola Delaney, a middle-aged frump married to an alcoholic chiropractor (Burt Lancaster) she calls "Daddy" or "Doc." We first see Lola coming downstairs in a ratty chenille robe to answer the doorbell; it's Marie Buckholder (Terry Moore), a college student answering an ad for a room Lola has for rent. Marie takes a look at the room and tells her she'll think it over. When Doc finds out that Lola has decided to take in a roomer, he's angry and forbids it. But when Marie returns to say she wants to rent the room, only Doc is home -- Lola has gone out to buy some orange juice for his breakfast -- and when he gets a look at the nubile Marie, he agrees to rent it, along with another downstairs room that Lola calls her "sewing room," though there's no evidence that Lola ever uses it for that. And so begins the film version of the first of William Inge's plays about sexual frustration. The movie would have us believe that Marie rouses a repressed desire in Doc and also makes him want to protect her, as if she were the child he and Lola lost, but as with most of the works by the closeted playwright, it has a strong gay subtext. When Marie, an art student, brings home a classmate, a young athlete named Turk (Richard Jaeckel), to pose for a poster she's creating, Doc is shocked to find the well-built Turk, in a track suit that shows off his muscles, in his living room. He immediately begins professing his concern for Marie's honor, her supposed virginity, but we can sense that he's more than a little aroused by Turk. We learn, too, that Doc was an only child, coddled by his mother and always shy around women, and that it was only because Lola was more than a little sexually forward that he got her pregnant and had to marry her. The real disappointment in the movie is the radical miscasting of Lancaster as Doc. He was 15 years younger than Booth, and no amount of gray at his temples can cover up his athletic vitality and make us believe that the two are supposed to be the same age. Still, despite the screenplay's disingenuousness about sexuality and the stagebound character of its action and dialogue, Booth's performance is worth savoring and there are moments of genuine feeling in the film.

Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942)

Paul Henreid, Bette Davis, and John Loder in Now, Voyager

Charlotte Vale: Bette Davis
Jerry Durrance: Paul Henreid
Dr. Jaquith: Claude Rains
Mrs. Vale: Gladys Cooper
June Vale: Bonita Granville
Eliot Livingston: John Loder
Lisa Vale: Ilka Chase
Deb McIntyre: Lee Patrick
Mr. Thompson: Franklin Pangborn
Dora Pickford: Mary Wickes
Tina Durrance: Janis Wilson

Director: Irving Rapper
Screenplay: Casey Robinson
Based on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty
Cinematography: Sol Polito
Art direction: Robert M. Haas
Film editing: Warren Low
Music: Max Steiner

"A campy tearjerker," "kitsch," "a schlock classic" -- that's pretty much what you have to call Now, Voyager if you're a critic trying to prove your tough-mindedness, like Pauline Kael or the unidentified New York Times reviewer who dismissed it as "lachrymose." But there are at least two moments in the movie that bring it into focus as something more than just a routine weepie, or rather that suggest that even a routine weepie has a point to make. One is the scene in which Charlotte Vale and Eliot Livingston break off their engagement in an off-handed, all-in-a-day's-work manner. Eliot is, after all, as square as John Loder's jaw, and not at all the mate for a woman who has just discovered who she is. Of course, the breakup kills Charlotte's mother, but that consequence is long past due. The other key moment for me is in the long final scene between Charlotte and Jerry Durrance. She has more or less adopted Tina, the daughter that Jerry's never-seen wife doesn't want. But when Jerry tells her that he's taking Tina away, there's one of the more magnificent Bette Davis moments from a career full of them. His reason, you see, is that by devoting herself to Tina, Charlotte is apparently depriving herself of the opportunity to catch a man. For a brief moment we see Charlotte incredulous at the reason, followed by another moment of something like, "Lord, what fools men are." Jerry drops several notches in Charlotte's esteem at the moment, which leads into the film's most famous line, in which she dismisses Jerry's egocentric wishful thinking: "Oh, Jerry, don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars." Charlotte Vale emerges from the film as one of the more admirable, level-headed women ever seen on a movie screen.